Algebra 85 - Building Polynomial Functions

Because of the tremendous variety of shapes of their graphs, polynomial functions are important tools for modeling phenomena in a wide range of fields such as science, engineering, medicine and finance. But since polynomial functions are simply the sum of monomial functions, how can adding these simple functions produce graphs with such a large variety of shapes? In this lecture, we experiment by adding various monomial functions to see what kind of graphs are produced. We also see how the coefficients of the monomial terms determine how those terms combine to affect the graph's shape.